{ Art about staying put }

I have this friend Paige, who totally gets inside my head sometimes. She sends me articles about place and community, and it infiltrates my brain-parts and strikes me when I’m, say, walking to work through alleys in Missouri’s capital city. Like today, as I passed a half dozen beautiful German buildings with boarded-up windows.

{ Rick Lowe: communities and social context as art }

“You have to spend years developing relationships to be able to do something like this,” he told me at the time. “It’d be an arrogant disregard of a community to come in and think you can grasp all the complexities of a place in a short time.”

This offers a welcome antidote to the art world’s relentlessly globe-trotting ways, one in which art is made on the run from Miami to Berlin to Hong Kong. Work like Lowe’s is the opposite. It is about observing, learning, considering, and, with the help of others, working to build something new. It is about staying put. The art world could certainly use more of that.”

{ Theaster Gates: restoring homes for public art }

From Paige: “I love that this guy [^] won a grant and am excited to see what he does with it. Also, it reminds me of Theaster Gates, a wonderful Chicago artist who, according to Wikipedia, is a “Social Practice Installation Artist.” I guess Lowe could be considered that as well? Anyway, one of Gates’s most famous installations is the Dorchester Projects in south side Chicago. Check it out!”

“After making his home in a former storefront on South Dorchester Avenue, Gates purchased the neighboring two-story vacant house and initiated a design project to restore and reactivate the home as a site of community interaction and uplift. The success of this project led to the acquisition of a third building across the street, which with the support of grants will be redesigned as a space for film programming and artist residencies.” (Read more on the Preservation Nation blog.)

“…I’m constantly engaged in this kind of dynamic flow of opportunity and sharing. And that just feels like smart living.”

So how does he do that? ‘I mow lawns that aren’t mine,’ he says. ‘I built a not-for-profit to ask people what they need. I hire sometimes, when a brother or sister walks up and asks me: ‘Is there something I can do?’ And sometimes they turn into long-term relationships. I can recognise when culture is missing in my neighbourhood and I can do something about it. Vernacularly. Sensitive to scale. Relative to my own means. Which four years ago wasn’t a whole lot.'”